Odyssey Computing's

INTRODUCTION

    The PIM replacement category has advanced considerably since then, with the popular and ever-improving Pocket Informant from WIS being joined recently by Developer One's Agenda Fusion (also proving to be popular and ever-improving) in this market space. And a completely revamped Pocket Informant is slated for release in a few weeks after this review is posted.

    When PIM replacements are compared in forums on the Internet, Pocket Informant (PI) and Agenda Fusion (AF) are the products that are usually included in the comparison.  Occasionally, I would see a post mentioning yet another PIM product called Pocket On-Schedule from Odyssey Computing.  Curiosity eventually got the best of me and I visited their web site.

    In looking at the feature list, my first reaction was "Holy cow!", although perhaps not in those exact words.  That list included many features that are missing in the already substantial feature lists belonging to Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant.  In fact, Pocket On-Schedule's feature list was so extensive that I began to think that mastering it might be a really big challenge.

    In looking at the price list, my second reaction was "Holy <not suitable for printing>!" With the current prices of AF and PI hovering around $20 for a full license, the full price of $119.00 and the special price of $89.95 for a single license of Pocket On-Schedule (POS) were more than a bit eye-popping.  It certainly is among the highest priced applications available for the Pocket PC, and more than 4 times the price of its mostly likely competitors, even on special.

    When your competition includes 2 of the most popular Pocket PC applications, how do you distinguish your product from them?  And do those features make it worth such a premium over those able competitors?  Let's take it for a test drive.

WHAT'S HOT

    In general, AF and PI are front-end replacements for Pocket Outlook.  That is, they use the same databases that Pocket Outlook uses, and provide greatly improved interfaces for and views of that data.  Some of their features, such as linking, require additional databases beyond those used by Pocket Outlook, but the bulk of the data used by AF and PI is the same as that in Pocket Outlook. As long as the data included in the Pocket Outlook structures is sufficient for your needs, AF and PI are strong contenders.

    As a PIM replacement, POs goes beyond AF and PI's primary role as PIM interface replacements. In addition to replacing the Pocket Outlook interface, POs substitutes its own proprietary databases for the standard Pocket Outlook versions. How is that an advantage? First, PO can take advantage of the flexibility provided by desktop Outlook and support more types of data particularly in the area of contacts. This data includes additional phone numbers and e-mail addresses not supported by the Pocket Outlook databases.

    In addition, POs isn't limited to a single set of data, as is Pocket Outlook (and therefore, AF and PI). You can create many different databases, such as one for personal appointments and contacts, another for business, another for your church group, another for your user group, and so on.  Although you can use categories with Pocket Outlook, AF and PI to separate your personal and business information, I never found this solution to work very well for me.  So I find this concept to be intriguing. But how will does it work in practice?

SETUP

PROGRAM FEATURES

Standard toolbar

   Visually, POs has many items that distinguish it from PI and AF. It uses icons on the top toolbar to switch between views, in contrast to PI and AF, which use the "tab at the bottom" method of switching.

The icons for views are common across all views.  Other icons, such as History and Links, are not available in all views, as the toolbar icons change according to the view or tasks at hand.  History and Links will be discussed later in this review.

Contacts View

Fig. 2a - The standard Contacts View	Fig. 2b - The Contact tap and hold menu

    The standard Contacts View (fig. 2a) is a columnar affair with user-configurable columns.  You can customize the view to include any column that POs stores for contacts.  POs doesn't include a preview pane for the selected contact as do PI and AF.  Of course, if you prefer to have a large number of columns displayed, you'll have to do a lot of horizontal scrolling to see them all. But this is obviously an advantage over Pocket Outlook, PI and AF which can only display two columns.

    The two column display in the other three products has one advantage over POs, however.  In those products, you can specify for each contact if you'd like the second column to be one of several phone numbers or e-mail addresses.  So if you have some contacts that you usually contact through their work number, while others are contacted through their home phone number or an e-mail address, you can display the preferred contact method in your second column.  Since POs doesn't allow for such mixed columns, you'd have to scroll across several columns to get all of these values.

    The Contacts View supports the on-the-fly sorting and column sizing methods made popular by applications such as desktop Outlook and Excel.  To sort on a single column, tap on the header above the column.  A small arrow to the right of the column name will point up for ascending and down for descending.  Tap the same header again to reverse the order.

    To change a column size, tap and hold on the border to the right of the header for that column.  You can then drag the border to set the column to the desired width.

    A single tap will bring a contact record up in the contact editor. A tap and hold menu is also available (fig. 2b).  Among other commands, you can delete contacts using this menu. Using any entry method that includes a CTRL key, you can use that key to multi-select contacts for deletion or other processing. This is evidence of this product's heritage on handheld PCs, which have keyboards. While it is nice to have this capability in any form, I find a multi-select mode (such as that in Resco File Explorer) to be a more convenient method for multi-selecting.

Fig. 2c - Contacts View with Personal State column displayed	Fig. 2d - Contacts View filtered by selection where [Personal State] = WI

    Filtering is an area in which POs exhibits considerable power and sophistication.  PI and AF provide the means to filter by category.  POs goes far beyond that with filtering capabilities similar to those of a relational database such as Microsoft Access.  In fig. 2c, you see the Contacts View with the Personal State column as the second column.  Tap and hold on a desired value in a column (such as an instance of "WI" in the Personal State column), and select "Filter by Selection" from the context menu.  The display will change as shown in fig. 2d, where now only contact records with the value of "WI" for Personal State are displayed.  My only issue with the implementation of filters here is that the "Show All" command is not part of this menu, but is instead on the View menu.  Since you can set filters using this menu, it would be nice if you could remove them here as well.

    I have to admit that I was unable to figure out the use of the third filtering option on the context menu, "Filter for...".  The result seemed to be the same as "Filter by Selection".  I couldn't find any references to that specific command in the documentation, so I'm sure that a POs fan will enlighten me when this review is published.

    This section merely scratches the surface regarding filtering in POS.  I'll cover some of the more powerful features in their own sections.

Fig. 2e - Customize View for Contacts - Columns tab	Fig. 2f - Customize View for Contacts - Format tab

    The options for customizing the Contacts View are extensive.  The Columns tab (fig. 2e) provides the means to select the columns to display in the view, as well as setting their order.  The Format tab (fig. 2f) controls the text in the column header, the width of the column, and how the text for the column is justified.

Fig. 2g - Customize view for Contacts - Filter tab	Fig. 2h - Customize view for Contacts - Sort tab

    The Filter tab (fig. 2g) allows you to set up more complex filters than you can with the tap and hold menu from the Contacts View, with such features as multiple expressions and logical operators.  One observation is that POs provides the capability of naming and saving filters, but those saved filters don't appear to be available for selection here.  At any rate, this functionality will be covered in the Filtering section.

    The Sort tab (fig. 2h) similarly provides the facility to create more complex sorts than you can from the Contacts View.  Here you can select multiple columns on which to sort.  One feature that I would have expected to see that is missing is the ability to set the sort order as ascending or descending by column.  The only setting available through this tab is ascending.  Also, I can envision a use for saved sorts, if you have a large volume of contacts and you frequently have to look at them in one way or another.  As implemented here, you'd have to set up the desired sort from scratch each time you wanted to use it.  These issues notwithstanding, POs has far more flexible sorting options than do PI and AF.

Fig. 2i - Customize view for Contacts - Style tab	Fig. 2j - Contacts View using large icons

    The Style tab (fig. 2i) has a few additional formatting and view options.  You can choose to display the list as large icons (as illustrated in fig. 2j), small icons, a simple list and details.  You can also select different fonts, change the font size and select font attributes such as bold and italics.  Finally, there is a brief summary section showing the number of contacts in the view and how many are currently selected.

Contact Entry and Editing

Fig. 3a - Contact editor - Work tab	Fig. 3b - Contact editor - blocked by the keyboard

    With its contact editor (fig. 3a), POs revives an approach used by the Contact app on the Palm-sized PCs, that of tabs dedicated to different categories of contact data, such as business and home.  When Microsoft redesigned these apps for the Pocket PC, simplicity was the direction and lots of tabs were considered undesirable.  As a result, the contact editor in Pocket Outlook consists of a single long scrolling entry form containing all of the contact fields that it supports.  I've found using that form to be clumsy due to the amount of scrolling involved.  Since AF and PI use the Pocket Outlook contact editor rather than providing their own contact editors, they share this less than optimum design.  POs scores here with an easier to use contact editor, at least from that aspect.

    However, an extremely questionable design decision by Odyssey overshadows the improvements provided by the tabs in the contact editor.  The contact editor does NOT resize or scroll to accommodate the SIP (soft input panel, such as the keyboard, character recognizer, Fitaly, etc.), as shown in fig. 3b.  As a result, if you're typing in the data for the Source and Category fields, you must do this without seeing what you're entering.  While these fields are drop-downs, you can type in a value if you prefer, and other tabs in these editors include fields that require text input (such as the Children field on the Home tab).  Given the polish and sophistication that POs shows in other areas, I find the choice to omit such a basic convenience to be very difficult to understand.  When I mentioned this omission to another developer, he was astonished as well.  "Pocket PC Development 101" was his comment.

    When I visited Odyssey's support forum, I saw a post pointing out this deficiency.  The response from Odyssey was that such functionality was being considered.  I'd like to weigh in at this point saying that, in my opinion, adding this functionality should be a top priority.  With a product whose price and feature set position it as extremely high end, I find the omission of dynamic forms to accommodate the SIPs to be akin to Lexus or Mercedes designing their premier sedans without audio systems.

    There, got that off my chest... ;)

Fig. 3c - Contact editor - category drop-down	Fig. 3d - Contact editor - category manager

    At first when I was working with categories, I couldn't figure out how to assign multiple categories to a single contact.  The only way that I could uncover was to actually type the categories in, separated by commas.  This didn't seem to be a very efficient way to assign categories, so I had already written my critique of that "deficiency".  Later, I stumbled on to the way to accomplish this.  I discovered a tap and hold menu connected to the Category field.  From there, you can go to the category manager (fig. 3d), where you can assign categories, enter new categories and delete categories.  So, kudos to Odyssey for this rather nice method of managing categories.  And a suggestion to add better documentation of this in the manual (although the manual is very well done overall).

Fig. 3e - Contact editor - Home tab	Fig. 3f - Contact editor - Phone tab

    The Home tab (fig. 3e) and the Phone tab (fig. 3f) are pretty much standard fare.  If you tap on the button to the left of a phone number, the dialer will be activated.  AF and PI also have a dialer, but after POs dials the number, a call dialog comes up to allow you to enter information about the call, time it, etc.

Fig. 3g - Contact editor - E-mail tab	Fig. 3h - Contact editor - Status tab

    The E-mail tab (fig. 3g) provides room for four e-mail addresses and an Internet home page.  If you tap on the envelope icon to the right of an e-mail address, the POs e-mail editor comes up with that address in the To: field.  If you tap on the home page icon to the right of the Web field, Pocket IE is launched and it attempts to display the listed URL.

    The Note tab contains a rudimentary note editor.  Finally, the Status tab (fig. 3h) displays audit information about the contact record.

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